attachment to the land of his birth grew stronger. Like Wordsworth and like Coleridge, he threw all his passionate sympathy into the English struggle for freedom against the tyranny of Bonaparte; he felt himself a child of his mother, England; he grew to love and reverence her institutions, political and ecclesiastical; but he never ceased to possess and to exhibit the spirit of a reformer. And in the modification of his political and religious views, he also represents a movement common to many minds in the opening years of our century.

The literary instinct developed early with Southey. The first masters of his imagination were Tasso and Ariosto, known through translations, and the author of the Faerie Queene. "I drank also," he writes, "betimes of Chaucer's well. The taste which had been acquired in that school was confirmed by Percy's Reliques and Warton's History of English Poetry, and a little later by Homer and the Bible." From poets of the eighteenth century his early verse received some influences; his early inscriptions were modelled upon those of Akenside; his early sonnets upon those of Bowles; his personified abstractions were in the manner of Akenside, Mason, and Warton; his rhymeless stanzas were authorised by Collins's Ode to Evening; and later he adapted the system of Sayers's rhymeless choruses to the purposes of narrative. In blank verse he was to some extent influenced by a

great contemporary, afterwards his close friend, Walter Savage Landor, whose Gebir had delighted Southey before the author's name was known to him. But Southey's facile verse in general has little in common with the strict outline, the severe symmetry, the poise, the marmoreal majesty of Landor's best writing.

No selections from Joan of Arc are given in the present volume. Joan was a daring, and to some extent a successful, effort for a youthful poet. Southey in later years rehandled his Joan; but he could not make it a good poem, and he obliterated much that is interesting as the expression of the somewhat hectic ardours and overwrought sensibility of his early revolutionary temper. When a Westminster schoolboy Southey had spent many truant hours in the house of a schoolfellow, poring on the folios of Picart's Religious Ceremonies. The book seized upon his imagination, and before leaving school he had formed the design of exhibiting all the more prominent and poetical forms of mythology which have prevailed among mankind, by making each the groundwork of a heroic poem. The first subject of his choice in connection with this design was that of the alleged discovery of America by the Welsh prince Madoc. The poem Madoc was begun at Bath in the autumn of 1794; having for a time been dropped, it was resumed during a happy year spent at Westbury,

near Bristol; and it was completed in its earliest and unpublished form on 12th July 1799. The creative impulse, however, was not exhausted, and when Southey came down to breakfast on 13th July, he had in his hand the manuscript of the first hundred lines of Thalaba. The plan of Thalaba had gradually evolved itself in his mind during four preceding years; its execution was swift, but not hasty. The later half of the poem was written during Southey's second visit to Portugal, and it was published while he was still abroad.

Coleridge has spoken of "the pastoral charm and wild streaming lights of the Thalaba"; it was a favourite with Shelley, and affected his imagination and influenced his metrical forms when he wrote Queen Mab. Much in Thalaba, which presents the life of the Arabian desert, and assembles the marvels of Mohammedan mythology and legend, is derived from remote sources; but its moral and spiritual motives are characteristic of the writer. As Joan of Arc, the "delegated maid," was divinely commissioned to restore to its independence the monarchy of France, and to purify her country by expelling the invader, so the young Arabian champion is singled out by Providence for a heroic enterprise and a signal victory over the powers of evil. Destiny has marked him from mankind, in order that by his arm, guided and supported by heavenly grace, the seminary of

magicians worshippers of Eblis-in the Domdaniel cavern, under the roots of the sea, may be destroyed. He is prepared for his arduous mission by a boyhood spent in pastoral purity and simplicity. He is tested both in his power of enduring pain and his power of resisting unlawful pleasure. He overmasters the temptations of the senses, and opposes himself even to the subtler seductions of enervating grief. With the forces of magic at his command, he comes to feel that there is but one true talisman-the talisman of faith in God; and in the might of that faith he accomplishes his destined task. The last victory of Thalaba over self is when he puts aside the purpose of revenging his father's murder. The pure chivalry of a woman, who gives her life for his, and dies to ward the dagger from his breast, calls forth all that is highest in his spirit; he discovers that to forgive is better than to revenge; purified from all personal and private passion, he becomes the single-hearted champion of God's cause, and at the last receives in Paradise the reward of the good and faithful servant.

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world; it is designed, after its own fashion, to justify the ways of God. For the purposes of romantic fiction Thalaba, as has been said, annexes the East; but the dominant note of the poem is the note of conscience, the moral ideality of the writer.

When Madoc was brought to a close in the summer of 1799, Coleridge advised that it should be immediately published. Southey, who had formed a high estimate of its importance, believed that it could be much improved by a careful revision. Madoc, he supposed, would be the greatest poem he should ever produce, and he desired to bestow upon it all possible care. In order to become better acquainted with landscape, manners, and traditions, he visited Wales in the autumn of 1801. Soon after taking up his abode at Keswick he set to work on a reconstruction of the poem, and diligently pursued his task during twelve months of 1803-1804. Madoc was now enlarged by one-third, and was divided into the two parts, Madoc in Wales and Madoc in Aztlan. It was published in 1805 as a massive quarto, making a large claim upon the reader's time and attention, a claim to which the public were not over-willing to respond. But Southey had some consolations : Landor was generous in his esteem; Scott declared that he had read the poem three or four times with ever increasing admiration; it kept Fox and his circle at St. Ann's Hill from their beds till midnight;